Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 drove me to madness until I started to embrace its world, not fight it - learn from my mistakes

I love Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, to the extent that it's probably my favorite game of 2025. I've played every DLC, pretty much exhausted all the side content, and have smithed so much iron that the ringing sound of hammer-on-anvil is all I can hear when I try to sleep at knight. I mean – oh, never mind. The point is, I love it as a game, but god knows it didn't start that way. Having not tried the previous entry, I was shoved into a world of rules and systems I didn't understand, thrown into the mud and told to ascend to the highest ranks of nobility with nothing but determination, sub-par stats, and a hideous arrow wound. It was incredibly punishing, but I didn't realise at the time that the game had been gently pushing me towards certain chances to become something more than the dirty peasant I was.

How to get started

The Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 map is huge, and I was never going to explore properly until I had a horse at the very least – which I did not. I didn't even have decent shoes! And if I went wandering across the Bohemian landscape without weaponry or a method of travel, I was liable to get jumped by bandits, though god knows they wouldn't have much to steal off me. In desperation I wagered my little all in the Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 dice minigame, only to lose everything to a man who kept insisting out of nowhere that he wasn't using weighted dice – even when I wasn't asking him.

It wasn't like this was a change in circumstances for the worse, Even from the beginning, my attempt to deal with the bandits at Bozhena's house in the game's prologue had been a disaster, with lots of flailing, head wounds, and unheard screams of "I surrender". Perhaps it had been my fault for picking the "Adviser" KCD2 playstyle, which had made me moderately good at bar trivia but wasn't doing much for my swordplay.

Clearly things would have to change. After too long spent trying to work out what to do first in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 – or at least how to save my lack of progress – I finally realised that playing this like a regular RPG was going to be my downfall. It's an immersive sim, so running around smiting people like it's Skyrim is probably going to end badly.

Early missions and the opening hours

Instead, I embraced my life as Joe Average, and the advantages that come with it. When the game provides the whole Wedding Crashers blacksmith or miller choice about which person you apprentice with, the smart choice turns out to be both of them, as they each provide surprisingly useful skills. I wasn't expecting the breadmakers to teach the all-important Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 stealth kill, but those men of the grain really know how to slit throats. Meanwhile, learning the basics of blacksmithing ended up being a reliable money spinner, and when I stumbled across the fabled Axe from the Lake, I knew how to reforge it into something with an actual edge.

And then, once I'd done my stint as a medieval normie, I could begin to test the waters with something more dangerous. I didn't have the best weapons in KCD2 by any stretch, but I had some serviceable steel and I'd found enough of the Brunswick armor locations to not die on the first strike. Perhaps more importantly, a bit of work for the local potion maker meant I knew how to make Marigold Decoctions, the blessed healing potions! Now I could sprint away from angry Cumans, quaffing furiously, then turn about and hack at them from a place of hearty strength.

And that careful balance – ordinary man by day, swashbuckling hero by night – ultimately paid dividends, and eventually I'd reached the point where I could just crusade full time, jumping around and going back to previous regions in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 to clear the map of everything I could find. I even had a decent money farm system going, so I was rolling in Groschen by the third act.

My point is that the most important of all the KCD2 tips you'll hear is ultimately this: accept that you can't be the valiant hero straight away, and that it's got to be something you work up to organically. I promise you that you'll get there eventually, but fortune doesn't just favor the bold – it also favors the patient.

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